There’s always that one guy, standing on a street corner, raving about the ‘end times’. For the last fifty years, Paul Ehrlich has been ‘that guy’.

Like all false prophets shaking their fist at the sky, his gimmick is a type of fear that only has to last long enough for a coin to leave a passerby’s hand – or in this case, a book to fly into someone’s online shopping cart.

Far from admitting defeat when humanity stubbornly failed to collapse, Ehrlich is back ranting that the next few decades of history ‘will be the end of the kind of civilisation...